Colombia’s Farc rebels, who once terrorized the country with kidnaps, killings and attacks on towns, have ended half a century of armed insurgency at low-key ceremony in which the United Nations certified that more than 7,000 guerrillas had turned over their weapons.
“Farewell to arms, farewell to war, welcome to peace,” said the Farc’s top leader, Rodrigo Londoño, to a cheering crowd of former combatants at the ceremony in Mesetas, a mountainous area in south-eastern Colombia.
“Today doesn’t end the existence of the Farc; it ends our armed struggle,” said Londoño, best known by his nom de guerre Timochenko. The Farc plan to launch a legal political party in August.
President Juan Manuel Santos said: “Today is a special day, the day when weapons are exchanged for words.” Santos was awarded the 2016 Nobel peace prize for his efforts to secure a deal with the Farc to end their part in a 53-year armed conflict that has left an estimated 250,000 dead, tens of thousands of people missing and forced millions from their home.
“Our peace is real, and it’s irreversible,” said Santos, who is now trying to achieve a similar deal with the smaller rebel faction the National Liberation Army, or ELN.
Jean Arnaut, chief of the UN peace monitoring mission in Colombia, said monitors had registered and stored 7,132 weapons, as well as munitions, which are being held in shipping containers in each of 26 special transition zones for Farc members as they prepare to enter civilian life. They have also destroyed 77 of hundreds of secret arms caches throughout the country.
Though the original peace accord was rejected by voters in a referendum, a revised deal went into effect 1 December, laying out the terms of the Farc demobilization, justice for victims of the conflict, and new guarantees for participation in politics.
Ex-combatants are due to remain in the camps until the end of July, when the UN will remove the weapons-filled containers. The arms will be made into three monuments to be installed in Bogota, Havana and New York.
Mauricio Jaramillo, a member of the Farc secretariat who began the first talks with the government six years ago in Havana, said that when he handed his weapon to the UN two months ago felt a “huge sense of commitment with Colombia”. He often doubted the day the Farc would end as an armed group would come “but it was always what we worked towards”, he told the Guardian.
Rank-and-file rebel fighters admitted they were nervous about future life as civilians. Jairo, 36, spent 20 years in Farc ranks before handing over his assault rifle last weekend, and he said he feared a violent backlash against former guerrillas – several of whom have already been murdered after disarming.
Still, he has big plans, he said. “I want to be a lawyer to help the new party,” he said at the special transition zone in Mesetas. “First, though, I have to finish high school.”